In this interview with Cynthia Hogue, Mullen talks at length of appropriation and subverting pejorative language, stereotypes, etc. to assert authority and identity; we see this happen frequently in her work, particularly with the idea of the Muse: classically confined to the idea realm, the Muse, though the source of inspiration to the male writer/artist, cannot create of her own volition. The Muse is summoned when the male poet needs inspiration, and she delivers; however, she is isolated in her role as supplier, not doer. (Interesting male/female inversion there; also interesting to think of Mullen’s alignment of “muse” and “drudge” [menial worker.]) Sometimes the Muse is the beloved—however, she is never the author, she is never the poet; she is always objectified.
So Mullen removes the Muse from her pedestal and hands her a lyre (or a mic in a jazz bar, maybe?) which is where this gets really interesting. Why song? Here’s what Mullen says in her intro to Recyclopedia, which includes 3 of her books, Trimmings, S*PeRM**K*T, and Muse & Drudge:
When I wrote Muse & Drudge, I imagined a chorus of women singing verses that are sad and hilarious at the same time. Among the voices are Sappho, the lyric poet, and Sapphire, an iconic black woman who refuses to be silenced. Diane Rayor had translated surviving fragments of Sappho’s ancient Greek poetry into an American idiom that sounded to my ear like a woman singing the blues. So Muse & Drudge, in a sense, is a crossroads where the blues intersects with the tradition of lyric poetry, as well as a text for collaborative reading and an occasion to unite audiences often divided by racial and cultural differences. Parts of this poem have been set to music by composers T.J. Anderson and Christine Baczewska. While many readers perceive Muse & Drudge to be a more insistently “black” text than the other two, I have written all of these works from my perspective as a black woman, which I believe is no less representative of humanity than any other point of view. (xi)
So there’s a glimpse into Mullen’s inspiration for Muse & Drudge, but my question lingers: are the sonic and/or rhythmic similarities from Sapphic translations the only reason behind the choice of song? Nope—so what do you all think Mullen’s up to? In her two other books in Recyclopedia, she writes insistently in the prose poem form—but in Muse & Drudge, we get quatrains. I like the line breaks—the space lets the simultaneously razor-sharp and punny paronomasia smack—and the speed by which she moves from critique to sympathy, all the while pushing pressure on different speech patterns and calling our attention to the embedded – isms in our speak. Besides allowing some breathing room, the format feels song-like, and the rhythms, rhyme, and refrain emphasize that more. Look here:
up from slobbery
hip hyperbole
the soles of black feet
beat down back streets (144)
She plays with syncopated rhythm and rhyme, and her alacrity is impressive, to say the least. Same question, though: why song? (Token grad school disclaimer:) If they are songs? If they’re not songs, what are they? Lyric poems.? So by writing lyric poems, what commentary is happening there (concerning the Muse, the woman, audience, the performative aspects of lyric, something else)? What is she thinking about concerning the roles of each? Is she thinking about them in the same way (song—blues, specifically, and the lyric)?
What is Lee Ann Brown up to? Her songs have a more folk song—y, hymnal quality, but seem to be doing some similar work to Mullen’s poems. Form is obviously huge to both of these poets (Brown says, “everything/ like the form/ is changed.”) Thoughts? How might these poets’ work inform our thinking about song and rhetoric? How are their songs and poems similar or different to Toomer’s and Notley’s? Or Sidney’s? How are these women subverting—or reclaiming, or something else—these forms?
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For me, Mullen’s poems are really difficult to talk about by themselves. I find myself wanting some sort of theoretical lens, so I’ve been thinking back, trying to remember the various essays we’ve read with the hope that one might prove helpful. I’m trying to answer Jackie’s question (“Why song?”) and I’m thinking that maybe Frye’s “The Rhythm of Association” might help me generate some sort of answer. Perhaps the reason I find Mullen’s poems so elusive is that they are in this weird state of flux, between sound and sense, babble and doodle. In this essay, Frye claims that the lyric poem, because of its relationship to music and song, is a union of sound and sense (i.e. cantillation) born of an “associative rhetorical process, most of it below the threshold of consciousness, a chaos of paronomasia, sound-links, ambiguous sense-links, and memory-links very like that of the dream” (271-2).
ReplyDeleteSo, in response to Jackie’s question, I think Mullen’s poems are not literal songs, but lyric poems. The lyric mode seems to be an excellent mode to work in if one would like to put pressure on language because the rhythmic and oracular association that partially governs the lyric poem can undo conventional semantic relationships and oftentimes forge unexpected ones (as we see in the example Jackie cited “up from slobbery”). Also, the lyric’s alignment with cantillation allows the poet to explore the “wordiness” of words, while, on the opposite side, the lyric’s alignment with the pictorial allows the poet to explore the materiality of words/language not only in the mouth and ear, but also on the printed page. In other words, the lyric is a mode for putting radical formalistic pressure on language, but Mullen goes even farther than this because she seems to be interested in extra-formalistic exploration – meaning she also plays with the rhetorical situation of the lyric. The lyric “I” of Mullen’s poetry is not univocal, but rather choric; we hear multiple voices in Mullen’s poetry and from the interview Jackie cites, we know that some of these voices are Sappho and Sapphire.
What are the implications of Mullen’s lyric verse? Going back to the stanza that Jackie quotes on page 144 – here we see Mullen negotiating sound and sense via the pun. Frye says of puns: “Paronomasia is one of the essential elements of verbal creation, but a pun introduced into a conversation turns its back on the sense of the conversation and sets up a self-contained verbal sound-sense pattern in its place” (276). I see Mullen’s poetry working in this way – as setting up a “self-contained conversation.” She subverts conventional sense-making, forcing apart the signifier/signified relation, and in its place the reader makes multiple meanings that are informed by the various associations the text implies and the conditions the text sets up. This paradigm is not only formalistic, but also rhetorical because I see Mullen turning her back not only on conventional sense-making but also on lyric convention. The Muse is given voice and agency; the Muse sets up this “self-contained conversation” when she turns her back on the male poet; she doesn’t need the male poet to achieve agency and voice and signification. By exposing the tenuousness of signification and univocality, as well as the tenuousness and elasticity of the condition of the lyric mode, Mullen calls into question the legitimacy of certain male/white power-structures. Here I’m reminded of Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of minor literature. Deleuze and Guattari claim that the structure and use of language accounts for relations of force and centers of power, and the writer who subverts the pragmatic use of language to simply relay information can begin to “evaluate the hierarchic and imperative system of language as a transmission of orders, an exercise of power or of resistance to this exercise” (Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature 23). So, I think we can expand on Frye’s thesis by looking at Deleuze and Guattari who are able to connect linguistic form and use to hierarchies of power. In this way, we can shed light on the subversive politics of Mullen’s poetry. Deleuze and Guatarri’s theory, when applied to poetry, further complicates our notion of the lyric as the externalization of some internal emotion or desire by allowing us to view this externalization of the personal as a political or revolutionary act. Mullen seems to be fully exposing the potential of the lyric mode to, as Deleuze/Guattari would say, “deterritorialize” language (via song?) and thereby to radically resist and subvert hierarchies of power.
ReplyDeleteLike Rachel, I also found Mullen’s poetry to be difficult, in terms of looking at each as a poem. They didn’t seem to be that separated from each other to me. I almost forgot that they were individual poems. It reminded me of listening to a good album, one where the songs were positioned so that it seems like there’s just one continual song (For instance, I believe Paul Simon’s Graceland and Radiohead’s Kid-A work like this).
ReplyDeleteAlso, like Rachel, I’m hesitant to call these ‘songs,’ but there were qualities that reminded me of the blues, and of hip hop. The reading experience, for instance, reminded me of listening to some blues songs. Sometimes I’m not really sure what the song means as a whole; some seem to be more like woven moments than narratives. The stanzas stand on their own while contributing to a suggested narrative. I almost enjoy these songs more—their bits of wit catch me off guard and if I’m still thinking about them as the song rolls on, that’s okay; I won’t miss the meaning. Maybe I’m wrong in saying this about Mullen, but it seemed to me like the meanings of her poems were set up that way: in witty moments. There’re too many examples to cite of this, but here’s one that gave me this effect because of its visual wit: ketchup wit reality/built for meat wheels/the diva road kills/comfort shaking on the bones” (105)
I thought, though, overall—the poems used song quite similarly to Notley. The bits seem more like a reference point, a shared space, a chance for the reader to say “Oh, I know this one.” But unlike Notley, who seemed to be a little more direct in calling the reader’s attention to the references, Mullen slid them within her stanzas as special treats for anyone who would know and understand. For example: “I didn’t went to go/swing low zydeco/so those green chariots/light your eyes up” (155). Then there’s the twist with Joy to the World: “Dead to the world/let earth receive her piece” (137).
I would be interested in looking closer at the poem on page 161 that references St. James Infirmary. The poem, from the beginning, seems to be about rap, but here’s the reference: “I’m down to Saint James Infirmary/getting tested for HIV/the needle broke, the doctor choked/and told me I’d croak from TB.” This intrigued me; she thinks she’s suffering from today’s plague, but the doctor diagnoses her with yesterday’s. I’m not sure what this was saying about rap music, but maybe we can talk about it?
Like Rachel, I've been thumbing through past texts, trying to find some clearer theoretical lenses in which to read Mullen and Brown. In particular, if these poems are in fact songs, are there genres we can use to more fully understand them? Brown saves readers time by labeling certain songs ballads, giving us a kind of framework in which to situate the poems. Though it's been awhile since we discussed Jan Brunvand's piece on ballads, his discussion of ballads (or at least our discussion that stemmed from his piece) was really helpful for me as I considered Brown's pieces. In particular, the idea of a ballad as a form containing "violent and elemental action," refrains that rename as they repeat, an objectivity that talks around raw emotion through the use of imagery, and speaker changes seemed to work with "Ballad of Phoebe Steele." Also, as Brunvand says is common in Irish/Scottish ballads, there is a supernatural element happening when Phoebe narrates from beyond the grave. The supernatural element contrasts greatly, I think, with the raw discussions of earthly materials and corporeality throughout: land, arms, heart, stone, tree, etc.
ReplyDeleteEven more interesting, though, Brown specifies that the "Ballad of Susan Smith" is a "modern" cruel mother ballad. In line with this ballad, it is instructional in that it demonizes the woman who betrays the sacred feminine: mother. Also, the voices of the murdered children judge Smith along with the reader, once again falling in line with the characteristics of a ballad. My question is this: in what way is this cruel mother ballad modern exactly? Brown definitely seems to be playing with language and form throughout, so it would seem that this poem would also add to/complicate the cruel mother ballad and perhaps even the ballad in particular. Is this ballad modern because it is speaking to a relatively recent event, or is there critique happening here? Also, how does the specification that these works are "ballads" influence the way we read them as poems? How do the ballads, the stories, fit within the larger work? To be honest, after initially reading the ballads in our selections for this week (and "Bitchin Blues") I felt a bit disoriented as I tried to transition from ballad and blues form to texts that didn't clarify the form for me.
As I read Mullen's "songs"? (I like the disclaimer, Jackie), I was reminded of Notley's use of a certain type of "woman done did me wrong" song. Throughout, she places pieces of these types of songs ("Ruby," "Black Jack Davy," "In the Pines") in her song(?). Mullen's pieces are a bit different though her text is definitely intertextual. She includes a hit soul song, "Stone Soul Picnic" (100), the "debbil" beat[ing] his wife," a southern cliché that sounds like the Blues (103), and more soul, "I'll Be Doggone" (109), etc. etc. Mullen's common thread seems to be the Blues or, maybe more accurately, soul music. No doubt there are many references I've missed, but it's interesting to me that not only is Mullen allowing the muse to speak, but the muse is speaking in code, speaking a common musical language. The implications for writing in "soul" seem endless, especially in terms of Mackey's theory of the ineffable, powerful music that pain brings. Soul is located deep down, in the gut, then again, paradoxically, it can't be isolated to any one point of the body . . . Am I totally out there with this? Is Mullen channeling a soul singer?
I guess, even if they’re not going to be categorized specifically as “songs”, they’re definitely song related or song influenced. I don’t know if it’s the diction that’s used in Mullen’s poems, the rhythm and syncopation or the probably the fact that blues are mentioned at least once or twice, but they seem very bluesy to me.
ReplyDeleteMullen’s poems are interesting in that despite the fact that they seem to use Language elements (I think), and in contrast to the other books they’re collected with, they have a distinct form. Like Jackie said, this one stands out because it is put into quatrains. It often has either an aabb, abab or abba rhyme structure. Sometimes it doesn’t, but when lumped together it seems that even the lack of form works as a form. They take a very lyrical form. The interview about her intentions for the poems really helped to make clear why there was such a form.
Lee Ann Brown’s poems have examples of a strict adherence to structure as well as examples of a breakdown of those same structures. “Ballad of Susan Smith” has a definite rhyme structure and a refrain that’s a throwback to the ballads we read at the beginning of the semester, but compare that to the “fragment ballad” with seems like a white out of the ballad form. I’m not sure why she uses both a strict form and a breakdown of that form together, but it makes “fragment ballad” more visually striking in comparison. The subject of death is helped by the spaced out eerie feel on the page.
I guess I’d like to take up two points regarding Harryette Mullen. In the interview Jackie linked us to, Cynthia Hogue mentions Elizabeth Frost’s reading of Mullen as “the blues quatrain but working with Bakhtinian heteroglossia.” I like this. That “but” within the quote is a necessary transitional word, because the genre of blues, at least as I see it, typically implies a unified, personal voice – usually expressing something to the effect of “My woman left me,” or “I work too damn hard.” The only heteroglossic element here is the interplay between the song’s narrator and the invented ethos of the performer, which, together, are not necessarily one. Frost’s assessment, though, is correct: Mullen doesn’t go for a homogenous “blues” voice. She plays around. For instance: “another funky Sunday / stone-souled picnic / your heart beats me / as I lie naked in the grass”; and two stanzas later: “traveling Jane / no time to settle down / bee in her bonnet / her ants underpants” (100). There is, for starters, an “I” in the first stanza and a detached speaker in the third, which at least suggests a multiplicity of voices leeching out. While it’d be an undertaking to pin down all the components of Mullen’s heteroglossia, I think it’s a rhetorical tool: I think she injects the blues with plurality in order to sing the blues for all womankind.
ReplyDeleteSecond, I’d just like articulate a quick thought: Yes, we can map Mullen’s quatrains onto the blues format – but, if she weren’t African American, would we? Tercets, to me, translate into blues songs much more easily (AAB, specifically), and I would never think to consider Muse and Drudge as blues unless prompted to, as I was here. I wonder, then, to what extent is Mullen’s ethos preconceived? Maybe I’m off-base here – but it seems like a question worth talking about.
Mullen’s poems, (maybe I am saying this because I feel like I had enough of her work to really work with or more to work with than Brown) which I would argue are songs, seem to be kind of inside joke or inside babble (to use the Frith definition) that she doesn’t necessarily want the reader to be keyed into. For example:
ReplyDeleteyou can sing the songs
with words your way
put it over to the people
know what you doing (115)
Mullen uses the song, taking from nursery rhythms, “where the green grass grows”. Although this might be a stretch because I’m pretty sure it’s a nursery rhyme or lullabye, but I can’t seem to name it or find it online. Anyone know what I’m referring to? And then she puts them into her own song following with “did you send your insignia/ up a greased flagpole”(114). When she writes that they can “put it over to the people/ Know what you doing” she is going over another audience. She can’t go through them, or maybe and more importantly, she doesn’t want to through them. She sings above them, using lines that might be familiar or seemingly easy to interpret like lullabyes and then turns them on their head.
Mullen is not singing her songs/poems to an audience necessarily separate from her performers. I say this because of the quote Jackie included where Mullen envisions her poems being performed by women where the song is both “sad and hilarious.” In creating a community of female performers that can be the audience, does she need an audience? Does she want an audience? Okay, right. I am not the one witht the question this week, but I kept asking myself as I was reading this, am I supposed to be in on this? Am I supposed to be hearing this? It seemed often, more like a confessional at a family party or a special song a girl’s grandmother made up for her to keep her from crying. Yes, I know there is more to these poems than that, but when I these lines:
she gets to the getting place
without or with him
must I holler when
you’re giving me rhythm (149)
Mullen tells a story, but it’s an intimate one. And I’m struggling why I keep seeing a grandmother image when I naturalize other lines like these:
he couldn’t help himself
he couldn’t help it
he couldn’t stop himself
no one stopped him (173)
She speaks out in these lines with a voice of reason, meaning the him or the male subject is a lesson. She tells a cautionary tale. Maybe this is why I am getting the grandmother image, of a wise woman who tells the story of lovers/men. I think it is men that Mullen speaks about more specifically. She tells of what the men have done or what the women have allowed them to do/act. Because she writes “no one stopped him”. And she keeps referring to men or him in the same poem:
she wants to know it is a men thing
or a him thing (149)
It is different from Notley who seems to be pushing towards a gender neutral or genderless (wait, don’t know if that’s possible) speaker. And I think this is because the song in Mullens work is more like a nuclear family rather than Notley’s human family. Mullen includes only certain family members, the women. She takes back the men’s language/words and sings them back, sings over their heads.
Well, y’all certainly put me to shame. I read the passages for tomorrow and also thought they were tough to interpret without some theory to accompany them. But rather than thumbing through the theory passages that we’ve read for this class, I kind of got into my “Hey, this is nifty!” mind-frame while I was reading the poetry and instead just wrote down a few reflections as I read Jackie’s question. Mind you, I’m not sure any of the reflections are theoretically useful, but I hope they’re interesting. ~
ReplyDeleteOne of the remarkable (and to me often frustrating) things about song is the rhythm, the fact that it allows for/necessitates a swiftness or a decimation or an elongation or a breakage of words to fit the rhythm. In this way the form of the word is changed. I saw something in Mullen that reminded me of this: “loco motive” (103). This breakage obviously allows for a double meaning and a reassessment. I am uncertain whether or not this plays into the appropriation and reclaiming of pejorative langue that Jackie mentioned as referring specifically to the racial relations as Mullen was manipulating them, but it does certainly call to mind the idea of appropriation as regards the forms that language and words often take, and, to me, proves useful as a lens for many forms of poetry and song.
Brown creates a similar phenomenon through wholly different means when she draws attention to her predicament that changing lionine to Leonine would change the whole form of the poem (76-7) and all that it represents as the texture of “lionine” on the tongue (not to mention visually) more recalls “lines” of poetry—and in doing so she reveals a deeper discovery in the poem: the multiplicity of form. (At least that was how I read the poem.)
I think one of the most striking bits that I’ve read for this week is from Brown when she writes:
I’ve already written
about the space between the o and e
in poet or should I say
of it, with it,
prepositions being
any way a squirrel can jump (118)
The metapoetry here draws special attention to the subsequent lines, and I believe this is the only time she employs this device in our excerpts. This conspicuous passage evokes various ideas of form, of course, from physical space on the page to the myriad mental possibilities of language’s movement, and encourages what I might call a binary approach to rhetoric (as it IS so effective) in mixing physical and mental imagery with complicated concepts and familiar (perhaps earthy?) illustrations.
These examples are startling, even unconventional, which is, I believe, why their form is rhetorically effective. The only problem with that, of course, is the danger one might encounter through too much enthusiasm. A break in form, the consequent creation of a new form, is only effective if it isn’t overused. Mullens may occasionally come close to this problem, but it’s arguable. And I haven’t read a lot of contemporary poetry, so I’d welcome other’s opinions!
on the issue of Mullen: songs or no, I have to take up the thought that while reading, I couldn't help but be caught within the rhythm of the quatrains to experience them as nothing but song.
ReplyDeleteBut, aside from diction that either invoked the Jim Crow-era south or explicit references to blues music, I was reading Mullen as nothing short of hip-hop songs, but hip-hop specifically in the context of neo-hop or alternative hip-hop movements. I know that for our hip-hop section I brought in Subtle, and I don't want to overplay this card, but I kept experiencing a head-swimming sort of familiarity between Muse & Drudge and the lyrics of Doseone, lead figure for such hip hop collectives as Subtle, cLOUDEAD, Themselves, et al. Take for example some lyrics from Subtle's 'Nomanisisland':
So much for beating your indoor chest
stood predator star,
never picked only placed before doors
Do you not now know what you poet...
holding your breath arms akimbo
stood base thinking in flames of yourself
at the manned gates to the fair Switzerland's brink...
would you fancy say going solo forever instead.
Setting sail for good on a standard stranded man crafted raft,
equipped with nothing save few-hundred euros
and the hypocrite inside you
lost where life is all but perfect,
taking the longest cut across wide open ocean possible
razor free and limeless on an never-again bent to kiss land tour...
and if things go well...you might harvest plankton from the rotted raft's rope for your supper, and for fluids take twice from yourself
a handful of urine sipped to grind spit
and such and such...what i find interesting here is the tendency lyrically toward abstraction, which I see in Mullen. Couple this with statements made by people like Jay-Z (hip hop icon, right?) talking about how taking cues from independent music (he specifically cites Grizzly Bear) is the direction of hip hop's future, and I would argue that Mullen's work serves as a stylistic precursor for the current shifts within the genre. This is not to say that she has been read by hip hop artists and the changes are a result of this, but to borrow a term from Campbell, there seems to me to be concurrence of 'vivacity' between the two fields. This might not be something I can rationally defend, and I am having a shitty time even trying. This is one of those cases where I am trying to capture in language something that impresses on the sensory or even sub-sensory, what we might term a 'gut instinct'. For whatever reason, I can't help but see connections between Muse & Drudge and the hip hop vanguard.